It’s time to take demography and geography seriously

At present, Army has a very large and well-established training school located at Oakey in Queensland, and Navy has a smaller but equally well-established training school operating at Nowra in NSW. AIR 9000 Phase 7 will see the procurement of a new helicopter training system including the aircraft, a suite of training simulators, and systems which will rely to a very large extent on a civilian workforce for all maintenance activities and a significant proportion of flying instruction and ground school instruction.

A decision has been announced to establish a joint Army/Navy helicopter school in Nowra. There are two glaringly obvious problems with this.

First, Oakey is a vastly superior location for helicopter training (or indeed any flight training), based solely on it geographic location. Put simply, the weather suits flying training to a far greater extent that the weather patterns that prevail in Nowra. Furthermore, the 2009 Defence White Paper stated that the Navy is to receive a new fleet of about 24 aircraft as a matter of urgency.

It is highly unlikely that Nowra can absorb these two huge major capital and infrastructure projects simultaneously. These are the geographic realities.

Second, Southeast Queensland is now the aviation hub for Australia. Granted, there are significant aviation hubs in other localities, but none is as extensive as Southeast Queensland. AIR 9000 Phase 7’s success or otherwise will hinge largely on the availability of a highly technical civilian workforce. This workforce exists in Southeast Queensland, and does not exist in Nowra. This is the demographic reality.
Now a bit of substantiation. Let’s look at geography first.

In 1998, the Department of Defence contracted Keatsdale Pty Ltd to undertake a study into, among other things, the best location to conduct helicopter training for Army and Navy. The Keatsdale team examined the issue in an holistic sense and took into account not just geography but also a range of other issues, such as fiscal reality, demographic capacity, urban encroachment at airfields, and the availability of training areas for activities like night vision goggle training. A key issue with geographic location was the availability of flying days based on rainfall patterns.

In terms of geography, Keatsdale identified that the ideal location for rotary-wing flying training, based on meteorological conditions, is an area west of the Dividing Range and north of Dubbo.

Why, then, has this firm conclusion – reached after an exhaustive Defence Department study – been ignored?

The next issue concerns demography. The concern is that certain locations do not have the appropriate infrastructure to support major military undertakings. The positioning of an F-18 base at Tindal in the Northern Territory provides a case-study.

A rational decision maker could not have seriously taken into consideration remote locality issues such as education opportunities, spousal employment, and the availability of civilian support infrastructure, and concluded that Tindal was the best choice available.

Remembering that a central tenet of the AIR 9000 Phase 7 plan is that the engineering workforce will be civilian, it is surprising that there is a refusal to take into consideration the very obvious advantages of the availability of maintenance personnel in Southeast Queensland versus in the Nowra area and greater Sydney basin.

Southeast Queensland is now firmly established, and continues to grow exponentially as the centre of mass for the defence, commercial and academic aerospace industry.

The Army Aviation Training Centre at Oakey is already subject to a civilianised maintenance workforce. The same can be said for many of the maintenance activities at nearby RAAF Base Amberley. The area is already home to a large number of helicopter maintenance personnel and there is no indication that the Southeast Queensland workforce will ‘up sticks’ and move south any time soon.

Oakey is a far better location to establish a Joint Helicopter School based on geographic advantage. Additionally, the Southeast Queensland region is a vital and thriving aerospace area and is continuing to grow. The Nowra region, quite simply, is not.
The decision to base AIR 9000 Phase 7 at Nowra is operationally, economically, and socially illogical.

Why then are both the Government and Defence continuing to maintain that this vast injection of public funding is best spent at Nowra?
Given the urgent requirement for new helicopter capabilities indentified in the 2009 Defence White Paper, this decision should be revisited as a matter of priority.